The present invention relates to the dissemination of a mass of outgoing digital messages to a selected group of recipients by way of various communication methods. More specifically, the invention relates to a system and method for dispersing a mass of outgoing digital messages by delivering them to one or more of a plurality of external vendors (or “providers”) that will be responsible for transmitting the messages to the ultimate recipients. The method for dispersing the messages is designed to mitigate bottlenecks that may arise due to limited or uneven capacity of the providers to transmit them.
Businesses and governmental entities, including municipalities and schools, are ever more reliant on communicating through the mass transmission of messages to their staff, citizens and family members of students to keep these constituencies apprized of important events, and sometimes of emergencies. For example, a school principal might need to inform the parent of every child that the school will be closed the next day due to some unforeseen event such as flooding, fire, or freezing conditions. Such messages might be sent to telephones, facsimiles, pagers, electronic mail (e-mail), and/or text messages. These messages will typically vary in their degree of importance, in the number of recipients, or in the immediacy with which they must be sent. Regardless of these varying factors, as a practical matter, each message being transmitted is typically placed in a batch of communications, or calls, by the processing system sending these messages. The processing system may then send a call batch, once it is assembled, to one out of a plurality of providers who specializes in transmitting them.
One of the shortcomings found to exist in the system described is that bottlenecks occur in which a provider that has been selected to transmit a call batch may not have sufficient available free capacity to substantially simultaneously transmit all the messages in the call batch that are forwarded to it for transmission. Or, even if it does have the capacity, its transmission may be unduly slow, or uneconomical.
Thus, it has been found that a method and system is needed to determine which provider out of a number of potential providers has the optimal capacity to receive a call batch for transmitting the call batch substantially simultaneously and, at the same time, with advantageous reduced cost to the management of a user system.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an appropriate dispersal system by which the foregoing problems may be avoided. The present invention addresses these and other needs.